Category: conventions

This is not a panel write up; it’s more of a rambling meander of panels I was on and panels I witnessed and thoughts I had along the way. It includes recommendations. But all of it is talking about Asian (mostly Southeast Asian) science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Thanks to Creatrix Tiara(sorry, Adeline coined this term!), I’m referring to Oz-based PoC involved in SFFH as Fae of Colour and I have no regrets. Hopefully you also have no regrets.

I was supposed to start with something nicer, rounding up my Continuum 13, but all I can really think about is the racial micro aggressions PoC experience at Australian conventions, particularly the micro aggressions experienced by our PoC Guests of Honour, and the ways in which con goers can prepare to have our backs (our own, and the backs of others).

And so, beneath the fold: some racial micro aggressions, and some ways to prepare to call them out.

Micro aggressions and the other things we say; or, First Aid for paper cuts

No Award went to Continuum! As we often do, being Melbourne fans of a certain persuasion. We didn’t get to many panels we weren’t on, so rather than doing an overview of the whole con, we thought we’d do a couple of individual posts about things that arose.

The first in this series is about the Con Runners Confab, which was not a panel so much as an informal discussion between past and future con runners about convention culture in Australia (and New Zealand) and its evolution and future.

This post is as unstructured as the confab itself was, but Liz hopes it serves as a jumping off point for ideas about new models of fan gatherings, and recognition of the people who put the work into building and maintaining places (real and virtual) where fans gather.

Born in Singapore but a global citizen, Joyce Chng writes mainly science fiction and YA. She likes steampunk and tales of transformation/transfiguration. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Her YA science fiction trilogy is published by Singapore publisher, Math Paper Press.

We are not the boss of you, or of your SFF con, but we think that Australian cons can do better in finding diverse creators to be guests of honour. (We do not exclude cons we’ve personally chaired from that.) But it’s not uncommon to try to think of a potential guest, and go completely blank. Names, how do they work?

So here is an incomplete list of non-binary, female, and male local and international people of not-whiteness who you could consider inviting to your con.

It was a big weekend, and Liz and Steph were pretty distracted by the AFLGF (and also Steph had a busy Singapore weekend), so somehow we managed to miss the theme of Canberra’s SFF con, Conflux, this year with three white guests: